Put Out The Stars
by Frankie McStein
Summary: Higgins loved the stars because Richard loved them. Magnum loved the stars because his dad loved them. Of the many things they both lost, through death and betrayal, the stars were always there. But they looked so dull afterwards. Until they didn't.


If the world were to stop turning, just hang silent and unmoving in space as it burnt relentlessly on one side and froze mercilessly on the other, I would be okay with that. If the asteroid that scientists keep warning about were to speed up its arrival, tear the atmosphere asunder and plunge the planet into a million years of winter, that would be just fine by me. If every volcano were to suddenly and simultaneously erupt, hurling dust and poisonous gasses across the stratosphere, smothering the entire globe, I don't think I would mind.

What reason is there for the world to keep spinning? For life to carry on? Why even keep the world in one piece? If I could rend the ground with my own bare hands, I would. If I could reach out and pluck the sun from the sky, extinguish its light beneath a bushel, I would. Why not? What reason is there anyone to be happy now? How can anyone smile in the face of my grief?

But I can't stop the world from whirling through space. I can't even stop myself from crying.

Because Richard is dead. So what point is there in doing anything anymore?

…

She tried going to work like she was supposed to. She had been told, by the same two men who had told her they had recovered Richard's body, that her resignation had been pulled, pending her requesting it be authorised. She had requested it be revoked instead and had received a perfectly professional email confirming her status was now unchanged.

But she hadn't been able to actually do anything once she was in work. She had gone in, signed in, walked to her desk, the desk that she was rarely in the country long enough to use, and sat. And stayed sitting there for the next 4 hours.

If people spoke to her, she didn't hear them. She didn't reply. If anything came through the system to her account, she didn't notice the alert on her computer. She didn't act on anything, didn't react to anything. But, to her, it was like she had just sat down and blinked, and the world had suddenly jumped ahead without her.

She didn't hear Matt walk up. Didn't hear him trying to get her attention. When she looked up, feeling as though she had only walked into the office a scant few minutes previously, she nearly jumped out of her skin.

"Sorry! I'm so sorry!" He looked horrified, devastated that he had scared her.

She glanced around, seeing faces carefully turned away and unable to stop herself from imagining the thoughts running through the minds of her co-workers.

_'She never was as good as she thought she was.'_

_'So pathetic. What is she even still doing here?'_

_'Never did think she was up to much.'_

"I uh… just wondered if you wondered if you wanted to get something for dinner?" He held her gaze for a few seconds, as if waiting for her to say something. "I mean, it is one o'clock."

Her eyes followed his finger as he pointed to the clock in the corner of her computer screen, blinking in surprise.

She hadn't gone in to work the next day.

The day after that, two men, different men from the ones who had ripped her life apart but wearing disorientingly similar suits, knocked on her door.

"A fortnight for the bereavement," they said, offering her the paperwork that made it official. She wanted to explain that she had already taken days of leave. But it seemed like it would take so much energy just to speak. So she sat, silent, and took the paperwork. She signed where they told her to sign.

When they left, she thought she was maybe meant to do something with her free time. But, even though she tried to think, nothing came to mind. She was so used to either working or planning everything with Richard. Even the things they didn't do together were planned around each other.

She tried going onto the balcony and looking up at the sky; Richard had enjoyed stargazing and had taught her several of the constellations. But they looked… different. Like a giant veil had been pulled over the sky and the light that usually glowed had been dimmed. Without Richard sitting warm and alive beside her, the night sky was just… dark.

She spent the full fourteen days alternating between the couch and the bed.

...

She had tried doing the psychological evaluations her handler had insisted on. She knew she wasn't going to be allowed back in the field until she completed the review. And she didn't want to spend the rest of her life behind a desk. Pushing papers wasn't for her.

But the questions were so inane. The smile on the psychiatrist's face was so plastic and fake. The 'trick' questions were so easy to spot. Even as disconnected as she was, it wasn't hard for her to sail through the evaluations.

In hindsight, that could have been the issue. She shouldn't have been presenting as perfectly well adjusted when she had just suffered such a loss. And there was little doubt in her mind that her attitude was not that of a person who was emotionally stable enough to go undercover.

She should care. She should want to be okay, want to get back to work, want to get help. But one of the questions, one of hundreds, maybe thousands, had stuck in her mind.

"Do you ever wish you could get revenge on the person or persons who killed Richard Dane?"

The 'correct' answer was some nonsense about initial reactions fading with time, about trusting her colleagues and counterparts and the justice system. But the real answer was far more simple.

"Yes."

Richard had been betrayed, offered up to Viper on a platter. And she had been destroyed. She felt like her entire being had been torn to shreds and the pieces tossed to the winds. She would never get them back. And, even if she did, she would never be able to put them back together again. There would always be gaps and holes. And she wanted Viper to pay for that.

She didn't listen to the words the woman was saying, watching her body language instead. For a shrink, she was putting on a pretty poor show of hiding her tells. They weren't going to let her back into the field. That was obvious. But that was no good. If she didn't get into the field, she wasn't going to get to track Viper.

She left England that night, taking the first available flight. She stared out of the window of the plane for a long time, ignoring the passengers around her who were tutting at the open shade as they tried to sleep. The stars still looked dull. Just a dark sky with balls of gas hanging in it. Richard had made the stars seem magical. But now they were just… there.

…

When we'd first been grabbed, we had all thought it was just bad luck. The worst kind of bad luck, sure, the kind that saw us taken in by an ambush that we should have been able to avoid. But still, it was just bad luck. Bad luck that we had been the group to be on that route. Bad luck that we hadn't spotted the lookout who'd been scouting for our approach. Bad luck that we had been so heavily outnumbered.

What a way for Lady Luck to tell you she had gone off you, right? To throw you and your friends into a trap and let you get taken away by people who would rather torture you than kill you outright.

So sitting in that hot, dusty cell, peeking out and seeing Hannah? It felt like salvation. I was so sure that she was there to save us. I crouched there and watched as she walked and talked and could almost hear the words she would be throwing around. Casually threatening to bring down the force of the entire United States military if we weren't released.

But then she walked back to the Jeep. Got in. Drove off. And it felt like I was back in the interrogation room. Back on the bench where my skin was cut and my body beaten.

Hannah, the woman I loved, the woman I was going to marry, start a family with. She was behind this. It wasn't luck. It was a calculated betrayal.

...

The pain was indescribable. It was like lightning searing into every nerve, charring every muscle. The electricity stopped, but his muscles still kept twitching. He was struggling to breathe in. Exhaling was easy, all his breath leaving him in screams. But breathing in again seemed impossible.

Magnum could feel his chest straining as his lungs sat frozen but didn't know what he could do about it. His head was swimming, and his vision was going gray. He could feel his face twisting into a panicked grimace, a cross between a wince and a yell.

And then water, freezing and dirty, was dashed over him. He gasped at the shock. The precious air flooding into his lungs, but it took water with it and he choked, coughing and spluttering as he tried to hold the air in, force the water out. His stomach and chest were burning. His muscles, already so sore from the viciously tight restraints and days of electric shocks, and his body, already so ill used through fists and feet and batons, screamed in protest as the coughing went on and on.

He had maybe five seconds to actually breathe, to fill his lungs and feel the sickening dizziness spin through his head. And then a fist was sunk into his bruised stomach and all the air was driven out of him again. He didn't even notice when the straps holding him down were undone.

They had to drag him out of the room and back to the cell. They had all made a point of walking at first. Rick had limped in with a dislocated knee that it had taken all three of them to relocate. Nuzo had staggered in with a concussion that had seen him vomiting for days. T.C. had stumbled in with 3 broken toes that they had been genuinely afraid he would lose for a while. It was a matter of pride. Of resistance.

But Magnum couldn't even crawl. He tried. He dropped heavily against a wall and slid his hands along it, trying to hold his own weight. But his arms keep shaking and trembling. And when he tried to take a step forward, his legs had simply folded beneath him. Two of the guards had grabbed his upper arms and lifted, and he hadn't been able to fight them off.

A cry of shock met him as he was carried into the holding room. He wasn't sure who it was, Rick maybe? He couldn't focus. He couldn't even see for sure where he was going. If he hadn't recognized the voice- It had sounded a little angry. Maybe it was Nuzo?- he'd have thought he was being taken back to solitary. He'd expected it, if he was honest.

Instead, he found himself being shoved through the gate, felt himself fall, and was caught by gentle hands. He was lowered to the floor, slowly and carefully, and struggled to keep his eyes open as those same hands poked and prodded. They were trying not to hurt, he knew. But, with every part of him bruised or bleeding or burnt, it was impossible.

His eyes drifted over to a hole in the corner of the wall. It was night, the stars bright in the dark sky. He had always loved looking at the stars, ever since he had gone on a camping trip with his stargazing dad. But they looked wrong to him now. Paler somehow, like they had been turned down. They hadn't looked right since he had realized Hannah had sold him out.

…

They'd taken T.C. again. Magnum was trying to panic, to feel some sort of worry or concern. But he was floating. He'd fallen ill a few days back. Or was it a few hours back? Time was sort of slipping away from him. He was sure it hadn't been weeks since the fever had hit him. Wasn't he? Maybe it had been weeks. Maybe it had been months. Maybe the entire camp was a dream, the nightmare of a fever-stricken mind. Or maybe it had only been minutes, and he wasn't in the cell at all but still strapped down to a table with a sodden cloth being held tightly over his face.

Either way, he was floating. It was odd, after so many months- days? Minutes?- of feeling heavy with pain, to feel light again. It had been so long since he felt normal that he wondered if this was how that felt. Was this what it was like to walk around free instead of being held in a cage like a rabid dog? Was this what it was like to have fresh air around him instead of the stench of dirt and blood and fear? Was this what it was like when the woman you loved actually loved you back and didn't sell you and your friends to the enemy?

It wasn't exactly pleasant, mostly because he knew, eventually, he would come back to earth again. The fear of what would be waiting for him- the constant pain as he was interrogated over and over, the unending panic as his friends were taken away, the soul-destroying guilt at the thought that this was all his fault- kept him from being able to appreciate the peace he was feeling.

No pain here, where his body was ensconced in cotton wool clouds. No worry here, where his friends existed as echoes of their own voices. No guilt here, where Hannah was just over the horizon and waiting for him to find her. He could breathe. He could let his body rest. He didn't have to be on his guard, to be ready to fight their captors or save the life of a friend.

But he knew it wasn't going to last. Even here, the stars still looked wrong.

…

It had been a long time since either of them had just sat and looked at the stars. Sure, they had stayed out after dark, sprawled on the lawn with a fire crackling merrily in front of them. They had sat for more than one night in various vehicles, staking out a site or running surveillance. There was that one night they had spent lost in the forest when Magnum had insisted he could navigate by the stars and Higgins had climbed a tree to find Polaris for him. They had spent the next five minutes arguing whether she had actually sighted the North Star or if she hadn't actually seen the I.S.S. instead.

But at no point had they simply looked up at the night sky. Higgins hadn't cared for the stars since she had worked her second job for her old contact's security firm, when she had been forced to protect a man who had murdered a five-year-old girl to keep his mistress a secret from his wife. They had been attacked by friends of the child's mother. Higgins had killed one of them. She had spent that night staring at the sky, trying to force the stars to look as bright as she remembered them being when she had been living in London, when Richard had sat with her. But they had remained dull and uninspiring.

Magnum hadn't bothered to look at the stars since long before they had escaped from the POW camp. At first, he had spent hours pressed up against the wall of his solitary confinement cell, drinking in the sight of the night sky, trying to pretend the stars looked the way he remembered, pretending he was back home and lying on the roof. But, some time during their fourth month, the cracks Hannah's betrayal had caused had been forced wide apart. After the scared, twenty-three-year-old aid worker they had all tried so hard to protect had been dragged out of his cell, after his screams had echoed around them for hours, after his body had been dragged back in and left for days in the heat, the stars had been nothing more than distant chemical reactions, dim and pale.

But now, with the ocean in the background, the gentle crash of the waves, their white crests picked out by the moonlight, they both lay back on their recliners and let their eyes travel up. It had been a long few days; a missing three-year-old, two frantic parents, an island-wide manhunt. And now they could finally relax. Rick and T.C. had left an hour or so ago, recognising that the pair desperately needed to just breathe.

Higgins didn't think of Richard as she looked at the stars. Magnum didn't find himself wrestling with the pain and the guilt of Hannah and her actions.

And they both thought, for the first time in a long time, that the stars looked awfully bright.


End file.
